Subject: Fowl Science. Scientists at NASA have developed
a gun whose purpose is to launch dead chickens. It is used to
shoot a dead chicken at the windshields of airline jets, military
jets, and the space shuttle, at the vehicle's maximum traveling
velocity.

As such it simulates the frequent incident of collisions with
airborne fowl, thereby determining if the windshields are strong
enough.

British engineers, upon hearing of the gun, were eager to test
it out on the windshield of their new high-speed trains. Upon
firing it, the engineers watched in shock, as the chicken shattered
the windshield, smashed through the control console, snapped the
train engineer's backrest in two, and imbedded itself in the back
wall of the cabin.

Horrified, the engineers sent NASA the results of the test,
along with the design of the windshield, and asked the NASA engineers
for suggestions.

The NASA scientists sent back a three-word response.... "Thaw
the chicken." (from the www--Anonymous)

The question of the use of alcohol and the teachings of the Bible
is an area where a similar situation to the above story is used.
Instead of shooting frozen chickens at windshields what has happened
has been that people have thrown arguments frozen by changes in
time, culture, and conditions at Bible believers to support the
use of alcohol. The result of this kind of application has not
been humorous.

The story of the positive uses of alcohol goes back about 10,000
years. As people began to live in cities, pure water became a
commodity that was impossible to come by. Hippocrates suggested
that water from springs, deep wells, and rainwater collected in
cisterns was safe to drink, but warned that other water was unsafe
for human consumption. Babylonian clay tablets more that 6,000
years old told people of that day how to use alcohol to make beer
recipes that would purify water. Ancient Greek statements about
breakfast use the word akratidzomai which literally translates
"to drink undiluted wine" and using bread in wine as
a dip was as common as today's bread and butter.

It does not take much experience with rivers to understand the
problem. In this country we make some effort to stop industries
from putting raw chemicals into flowing waterways. Most cities
have sewage treating facilities which remove at least some of
the contaminants in raw sewage. Imagine a city of thousands of
people with no garbage or raw sewage or animal waste disposal
system. What would a river flowing through the city be like?
The famous rivers of the world have all suffered such contamination
that their waters actually smell. In the United States, the Cuyahoga
River in Ohio actually caught fire several years ago.

It is with this background that we see the reasons for alcohol
being used by ancient people, including biblical characters.
Examples are the water-to-wine story of Jesus in
John 2:1-11 and
Paul's recommendation of "take a little wine for the stomach's
sake" in
1 Timothy 5:23. Alcohol in this concentration is
quite low. Yeasts produce alcohol, but they can tolerate only
very low concentrations (less than 16%). Up until 1500, alcohol
was going to be of low percentages and would be a primary source
of fluids and nutrition. The Roman Catholic church operated the
biggest and best vineyards for some 1300 years and it was thought
of as a resource.

In 1500, Alsatian physician Hieronymus Brunschwig described distillation
in the first printed book on the process entitled Liber de
arte Distillandi. Because alcohol vaporizes at 172°F
(78°C) and water vaporizes at 212°F (100°C) it
was now possible to produce much higher percentages of alcohol
than would ever be produced naturally. Beverages produced by
boiling water such as coffee, tea, and cocoa also provided options
not previously available. The result was that alcohol moved from
being a purifier of water to being a recreational drug. By 1813,
Thomas Trotter and Benjamin Rush described alcohol abuse as a
disease. The latest figures show 20 million people whose lives
are disrupted by their relationship with alcohol and 12,000 children
per year damaged seriously by the use of alcohol by their mothers.

There are several lessons we hope are obvious from this discussion.
The first is that the use of alcohol in biblical times is not
the same as the use today and cannot be used as an argument to
sanction drinking. Alcohol today can be strongly argued to be
the most destructive substance to humans on the face of the earth.
The idea of
1 Corinthians 8:7-13 and
10:28-33 that Christians
will do nothing that negatively impacts their brother makes it
hard to justify on a biblical basis any use of alcohol or any
other recreational drug. Another lesson is that alcohol is a
useful and productive substance and not a destructive agent by
nature. Man has misused alcohol to his own destruction; anything
can be used in a destructive way.

Discussion about the rightness or wrongness of alcohol needs to
be couched in what the condition of the alcohol is--just as the
condition of the chicken in the story at the start of this article
needed to considered. The alcohol used in the days of Jesus and
the alcohol being used today are as different as the frozen chicken
and the thawed chicken. (Source of alcohol data: "Alcohol
in the Western World" by Bert Vallee, Scientific American,
June, 1998, pages 80-85.